


The Deeds of Mercy

by moemachina



Category: 3:10 to Yuma (2007)
Genre: Families of Choice, Father-Son Relationship, Fictive Kin, Gen, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2007
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-15
Updated: 2012-08-15
Packaged: 2017-11-12 05:23:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/487170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moemachina/pseuds/moemachina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a stagecoach robbery goes wrong, Charlie Prince wakes up among the dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Deeds of Mercy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fairy_tale_echo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairy_tale_echo/gifts).



> Written for Yuletide 2007.

_A fire is burning low, and a boy is watching it die.  
_

_"Hey, boy."_

_The boy looks warily at the prisoner to his left. There are other men lying around the fire, but they are asleep and unbound._

_"Hey, boy," the prisoner tries again. "Are you really prepared to do this? To go all the way?"_

_The boy frowns. "I can do it."_

_"No reason to do it," the prisoner says. "Are you just doing it because your daddy says so?"_

_The boy opens his mouth, but before he can respond, a hoarse voice calls, "William!"_

_The boy recoils. "What?"_

_The other man strides out of the darkness and reaches the firelight. "William, how often do I have to tell you? Don't talk to him."_

_"I wasn't..." William mutters sullenly._

_"He wasn't," the prisoner transposes smoothly. "I was just talking to myself, Dan."_

_Dan looks at the prisoner grimly, but then he turns to his son, who has his face averted in irritation. Dan's expression softens._

_"William," he says. "Go and gather more firewood. Go up by the river to do it."_

_William mumbles something as he rises to his feet and moves away from the fire._

_"That's a good boy you have there," the prisoner says._

_"You don't need to tell me that," Dan says._

_"He would do anything for you," the prisoner says slyly. "That's true loyalty right there."_

_"Yeah?" Dan says in irritation. "You know a lot about loyalty? You got any sons?"_

_The prisoner says nothing. Dan hunkers down by the fire, and his expression does not invite further conversation. Instead, the prisoner watches the dying fire. Eventually, he sleeps._

*****

Charlie Prince woke with difficulty. Blood had dried on his face, and his eyelashes were sticky. It took effort to peel them away from his skin.

He sat up and nearly threw up. The hard Arizona sun pressed down against him. Aside from the flies, there was not a living thing in sight.

It took time and pain, but Charlie got to his feet. He stood there, swaying, and considered his options.

He did not consider long. It was not a hard choice. He would, as he must, find Ben Wade.

There was a dead body next to him, but Charlie ignored it.

He started for the mouth of the dry ravine. There was a terrible pain in his left side, and Charlie could not always stifle the moans that came to his lips. He had been shot; he might have the bullet in him still. Charlie did not know all the whys and hows, but he knew a lodged bullet was no lovely thing. He had seen men turning the color of dead fish as they carried the bullet deeper. He had seen them turn loudly delirious before they folded up and died.

He had also seen a man who, after taking a bullet in the left shoulder, managed to hold up a bank, steal a horse, and get clear out to Mexico without uttering a word of pain or complaint. The man fell asleep in a little town called Esperanza, and when he woke up, he found the bloody bullet on the pillow beside him. He had laughingly displayed it to his men as they ate eggs and tortillas the next morning.

No bullet could bring Ben Wade low. Ben Wade was not like other men.

Charlie Prince staggered forward until he reached the overturned stagecoach, which was nearly hidden in the tall scrubby bushes below the road. There were unmoving bodies lying nearby, and Charlie judged that they had been dead for half a day.

This came as a relief to Charlie, who had been unable to gauge how long he had been unconscious. It had been a few hours, no more. The rest of the gang would not be far away. Charlie could still reach them.

He sat down for a while beside the stagecoach and listened to his own rough breathing. The pain was bad, but Charlie had felt worse pains, and he had no intention of lying down to die. He had something he had to do first. He had to reach Ben Wade.

Charlie crawled to the nearest corpse and began going through the man's coat. The dead man had already been cleaned out thoroughly, but Charlie was not looking for pocket watches or loose change. The man had a small flask of gin hidden beneath him. Charlie unscrewed the cap and poured the liquor down his throat. It blazed a trail right from his tongue to his belly, and it dimmed the drumbeat of pain.

Charlie fastidiously wiped the other man's blood from his fingers.

He found a scarf on another body, and he wound the cloth around his chest. He did not try to remove his waistcoat and investigate the source of the pain. There was not much he could do, and so he left well enough alone. It did not seem to be bleeding much. Most of the blood on his face and clothing had come from someone else.

He stood up and frowned at the horizon. Ben Wade's men could be anywhere by now, but Charlie thought they might have returned to their camp from last night. It was possible that they had cleared out entirely from the area, but Charlie doubted it.

After all, they did not know what he knew.

He started walking east with one hand pressed against his aching side. By the twentieth step, he would have given his soul to lie down and sleep, but he grimly kept walking. He had to reach Ben Wade.

The sun moved overhead. Shimmering mirages danced at the corner of his eyes. He seemed to hear distant laughter and brief spurts of song. There were footsteps behind him and whinnying horses in the hills ahead.

At one point he fell, and it took him half an hour to rise again. He licked his dry lips and started forward. He began talking to himself in a cracked whisper.

Ben Wade did not know what Charlie Prince knew.

Ben Wade had once killed a man for beating a whore in Tucson. It had not even been a good-looking whore, but Ben Wade had shot the angry man in that dirty alley all the same. The man had dropped like a bloody stone, and the whore had scrambled away without looking at them. Holstering his gun, Ben had shrugged and turned to Charlie. "You know," he said in his low, deep voice. "Sometimes you just have to treat men like the mad dogs they are. Shooting 'em can be a mercy."

Ben Wade had planned how they would rob the stagecoach. It had been a good plan. It had gone wrong.

Ben Wade could see a flea move along the feathers of a hawk that was flying a mile off.

Ben Wade was the last thing Charlie had seen before he had been shot. Wade had been standing on the other edge of the ravine, and he had glanced over to Charlie a moment before the loud crack and the obscene pain. They had looked at one another, and then Charlie looked at the ground, and then Charlie looked at nothing.

Ben Wade could ride flat-out for a day and a night without sleep, and at the end of it, the horse would be dead but Ben Wade would be singing yet.

Ben Wade had left Charlie Prince for dead.

Charlie scrubbed his eyelashes, which were sticky with another man's blood. He kept walking.

*****

It was Morgan who saw him first, and it was Morgan who announced that a lone man was approaching the camp. It was late afternoon.

"I'll be damned," Ben Wade said. "It's Charlie Prince."

The other men stared at the figure trudging toward them over the hill.

"Didn't you say he was dead, Morgan?" Wade asked. "I strongly remember you telling me that he was dead."

Morgan shuffled his feet grimly. "He wasn't breathing. I couldn't feel no breath."

"He ain't going to be too pleased with you, Morgan. It's liable to rile a man when his friends abandon him as food for the vultures."

Wade was sitting on a rock and cleaning another man's pistol. The rest rose to their feet as Charlie stumbled into the circle of their camp, but Wade remained sitting calmly.

"Hello, Charlie." Wade began slotting a bullet into the empty chamber.

"Hello, boss." Charlie came to a stop and surveyed the other men. Ben Wade's men were the roughest and meanest creatures on God's green earth. They would have slain their grandmothers for a pretty whore or a good hand of cards. They did not flinch from pain or cruelty or death. The only thing that set them apart from Charlie Prince was the purity of Charlie's heart.

"Miss me?" Charlie asked.

"Sure did," Wade said serenely, placing another bullet. "Next time, I'll know better than to let Morgan check the corpses. Should've known that it would have taken the devil himself to bring you down, Charlie."

"Yes," Charlie said.

"Bad wound, Charlie?" Another bullet went in.

Charlie shrugged gingerly. "I'll live." He began to take careful steps toward Wade.

"We'll get a doctor to look at you at that place over the ridge. You want anything to drink, Charlie?" A fourth bullet.

"Nah." Charlie had nearly reached Wade. "Best not to eat, I think."

"Fair enough. I hope you ain't sore about us leaving you, Charlie. We thought you were a goner, you see. It was bad information, I confess, but I hope you ain't sore."

Charlie paused before Wade. "No, boss. I know the score. You did just and proper. I would have done the same to you," he lied.

"I don't mind admitting that I was feeling low about today's work. A job gone bad, and my best man down. It wasn't worth it." A fifth bullet.

"I know, boss. There wasn't anything in that strong-box, was there?"

Wade put the last bullet in the gun and spun the chamber. "No, Charlie," he said softly. "There was not a thing in that bank box."

Charlie nodded. "It was a put-up job."

"Yes," Wade whispered. "Yes, that it was. How'd you know that, Charlie?"

Charlie looked up and fixed his cold eyes on Morgan. "Boss, I know a lot of things. For example, I know that I got shot in the back. And I know who was standing behind me."

There was a moment of perfect stillness among the gathered men, and then Morgan uttered an explosive oath. He reached for the gun in his holster, but he did not reach far. Charlie Prince plucked the new-cleaned gun from Wade's open hand and shot Morgan through the neck.

The man fell with a wet gurgle.

The rest of the men stared down at the body. No one moved. 

"I figure," Charlie said, "that he must have struck a deal to draw out the legendary Ben Wade and collect a reward. The stagecoach was supposed to be a trap for you, and he was supposed to kill me before things got going. But things went wrong, and you were too good for them, and I kept breathing. I don't know why he returned here with you. Maybe he thought you wouldn't find out." Charlie spat. "He was awfully stupid to let me live."

Ben Wade shrugged. "You didn't know Morgan, Charlie. He probably thought he was doing a kind thing, letting you live. Or, at least, not compounding an evil thing. He didn't think you'd make it back to us, of course. But I never much liked Morgan, and I guess I'd rather be double-crossed by him than by someone I liked." He held out his hand. "Can I have my gun back, Charlie?"

"Sure, boss," Charlie said. He gravely handed back the gun, and then, his heart's desire achieved, he finally allowed himself to faint.

*****

_The prisoner wakes up when William, cracking twigs underfoot, stumbles back to the fire with a bundle of dry wood under his arm. He and his father carefully nurse the fire back into a thriving blaze, and the prisoner watches them silently._

_"All right, William," Dan says. "I'll take the watch now. You go ahead and sleep."_

_William resists. "No, I can finish it, I can..."_

_"Go rest," his father says firmly. "I won't have your mother upset with me for working you too hard."_

_At the mention of his mother, William closes his mouth. After a moment, he says, "All right. Good night."_

_"Good night, William. Sleep well."_

_Dan watches the fire for a time. He looks up and sees the prisoner's dark eyes glittering back at him._

_"A good boy there," the prisoner says dryly._

_Dan nods tightly._

_"I don't have that much experience with sons and daddies," the prisoner says. "I don't have any of my own, in either variety. Did you know your daddy, Dan?"_

_"Yes," Dan says. "He was a good man."_

_"Mine wasn't," the prisoner says. "And so I've got no knowledge of being a good one myself."_

_Dan says nothing for a while, and then he says, "You try to do the best you can for them, even when they don't see it that way. It's about love and mercy." The prisoner makes a noise halfway to a laugh, and Dan says sharply, "You know a lot about mercy, Wade?"_

_"I've encountered mercy once or twice in my ramblings," Ben Wade says. "In my experience, it always comes back to bite you."_

 


End file.
